Page 56 - Convergent Journalism an Introduction Writing and Producing Across Media

WORDS: THE FOUNDATION STONE OF JOURNALISM

Making a Middle Matter
Most beginning journalists understand the idea of a beginning and an
end. Most of them, however, don’t understand what makes a middle
work. The middle of a story needs to be more than the opportunity to
kill off some space until you can get from that great lead to that killer
closing quote. You must make your middle matter.
Journalists tend to make it more difficult than it needs to be when
they put the middle together. A common phenomenon among journal-
ists is that of “notebook emptying,” which leads to overly long stories
with flabby middles. Too often, writers find themselves attached to the
material they have gathered, leading them to put every last detail in
the story.
Details are good when they help tell the story. However, using
details for the sake of using details creates problems. In newspapers or
magazines, space constraints tend to curtail the journalistic desire to
empty every last scrap of information from a reporter’s notebook. The
expansive nature of the Web is both a benefit and a curse. While it
opens the doors to longer and longer stories, it doesn’t guarantee that
46 those stories will be any better than their truncated colleagues.
To make sure your middle matters, go back to the rules that govern
the inverted pyramid: Facts should be organized in descending order
of importance. Make sure that each fact adds to and supports the lead.
Sometimes, a few worthless sentences creep into the middle and hide
there. Weed them out and give your readers only the key stuff.
Make sure that there is enough background information to make the
reader understand the story, even if they haven’t seen a story on this
topic before. An editor once gave me a simple test that allowed me
to see if I had provided my readers with enough information: Imagine
your reader is a businessperson on a trip from California to New York.
The traveler has to change planes in your city and happens to grab a
copy of the local paper on the way to a connecting flight. In the middle
of the rest of the flight to New York, the person reads your story. Is
there enough background in that story to allow that reader to follow
your story? If not, go back and add more.
Finally, read each sentence and then state, “This matters because ...”
and fill in the rest. You should be able to say things like “This matters
because it shows how much damage the fire did to the house” or “This
matters because it tells people when the next presidential debate will
be on television.” Make sure that you really try to take your story apart,